This working group offers a creative platform to discuss the historical, social, and cultural underpinnings of contagion across different texts and contexts. Although contagion has garnered significant attention from fields related to public health and even the history of STM, the working group opens newer pathways to discuss how contagion interacts with indigenous cultures and communities across the globe, with an added emphasis on the Global South. It invites critical discussions on narratives dealing with contagious outbreaks, which include but are not limited to: literary fiction, non-fiction, visual culture, public and private (im)material archives, critical texts and emerging scholarship pertaining to a newer understanding of contagion from the beginning of the modern era. Such a dialogue elucidates the metahistory of contagion from alternative vignettes. The group draws on the conveners’ strength in the domain of health humanities, cultural studies, gender studies, subaltern studies and critical theories to raise important questions on our perceived understanding [and the lack] thereof contagion.
The working group invites discussion papers from both established academics and ECRs across the disciplines of history, humanities, social sciences and even public health. The pla form shall guide participants to navigate through the contemporary explosion in narratives surrounding contagion post-COVID-19 and its historical, cultural and literary intertextualities in the past. Overall, it encourages dialogue in the form of oral presentations, poster and snippet presentations and book discussions touching contagion as its core element.
Group Conveners
Adhitya Balasubramanian
Adhitya Bala is a Ph.D. research scholar in the Department of English & Foreign Languages, Bharathiar University, Coimbatore, India. His areas of interest include the interdisciplinary field of Health Humanities, Bioethics, Narrative inquiry in Bioethics and African American Bioethics. He is also working as a Research Assistant under Rashtriya Uchchattar Shiksha Abhiyan (RUSA) 2.0 - Bharathiar Cancer Theranostics Research Centre (BCTRC).
Dilip Das
Dilip Kumar Das is a Retired Professor of Cultural Studies at The English & Foreign Languages University, Hyderabad. He is a recipient of a Fulbright Postdoctoral Fellowship at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, USA and a South Asia Regional Fellowship from the Social Science Research Council, New York. His research area is interdisciplinary body studies, and he has published essays on the social dimensions of disease.
Thiyagaraj Gurunathan
Dr. Thiyagaraj Gurunathan is currently working as an Ad-hoc Faculty member of English in the School of Humanities and Management, National Institute of Technology (NIT), Andhra Pradesh, India. His areas of interest include Health Humanities, Cultural Studies, and the History of Science & Medicine in India. His doctoral research covers the interdisciplinary fields of Indian Literature and History of Science. His thesis particularly reads on the socio-cultural responses of native Indian communities via Indian literature.
Pritikana Karmakar
Dr. Pritikana Karmakar is an Assistant Professor working in the Department of English and other languages, GITAM Deemed University, Hyderabad, India. Her research focuses on the biopolitics of the trans-species imaginary and the interlocking oppressions at the intersections of ecological disasters and counteractive biotechnological progress, with a special focus on epidemic narratives.
Annie Siby
Annie Siby is a Ph.D. research scholar in the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, National Institute of Technology, Tiruchirapalli, India. She is interested in the cultural history of public health in early 20th-century South India.